yeh but you will get new glass icons, so please stop complaining. Apple is getting rid of some worthless AI workers but I bet they just hired all Microsoft Aero Glass experts
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Apple Continues Losing AI Experts to Meta
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There's an "AI Expert" born every minute in this hype phase so you're never short of them.
Zuck said AI will be able to replace a mid-level programmer by the middle of 2025 but his very mid prediction from his very mid brain failed harder than his Metaverse and he still has to lure programmers and engineers with millions of dollars.
Zuck said AI will be able to replace a mid-level programmer by the middle of 2025 but his very mid prediction from his very mid brain failed harder than his Metaverse and he still has to lure programmers and engineers with millions of dollars.
These guys were already wealthy and now, with even average financial advice and management, will be billionaires before the end of their lives, most likely. Whatever your opinion about the mere existence of this level of wealth, I think there's little else that contributed to their decision.
They couldn’t go to a worse company. All that for what ? A better way to invade your privacy ? Fake AI friends on Facebook ?
I say good riddance.
I say good riddance.
I, for one, would gladly invade your privacy and fake AI friends on Facebook for $200M signing bonus and stock options!
Hope it won't happen. Claude is too good to be ruined by Cupertino crowd.
I burned what would have been $20M in stock today by quitting once on the basis the company was going to do harm to society, which it did. I look back and being complicit with it was not worth the money.
But a lot of people are "**** you I've got mine".
Good for you! Too bad not everyone is that morally straight.
On the other hand, everyone mines everyone's privacy now, you have to be quite tech-savvy and paranoid to avoid that.
It's not like OpenAI is using child labor or producing toxic waste by rare-earth mineral mining, or something. That's Apple's prerogative. But hey, their PR is better than OpenAI's! Surely, they're a more moral company.
P.S. Apples (lol) to oranges here - 20M in future options is very different from 200M in cash now.
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Apple was way ahead of the game when they sold their first computers for $666 back in 1976.
There is no "godfather of AI". That is a title given by media when they pull out some old man to scare everyone with. The media are corporate lackeys who hate you working people. They hate you deeply so it is entertaining for people with no life skills to scare you skilled people with "AI".
That "godfather" above was recently interviewed on another YouTube channel making a fool of himself. He tried to demonstrate a chatbot that failed badly and then viewers noticed the "godfather" can barely type on a keyboard.
Apple doesn't buy mature companies.
They have too much hubris and believe that they can do better by developing inhouse.
They do buy small startups for the talent/patents/stifle potential competitors, but they don't buy big companies.
The largest acquisition apple has ever made was beats, for 3 billion, with around 600 employees at the time; and second was intel's modem business for 1 billion; largely for the patents.
In contrast; Anthropic is valued at about 70 billion. Even if it's absolutely the right thing to do; apple believe they'll get better value making it themselves.
Famously, apple turned down buying tesla for 50 billion in 2017, opting to instead focus on their own project titan. Apple had the cash at the time; and would've returned 10-20x in shareholder value; yet here we are.
Apple has dismissed the idea of buying disney multiple times and have chosen to launch their own media franchise instead.
Microsoft owns 49% of OpenAI's for-profit arm and started accumulating it in 2019. Apple has had every opportunity to buy into it too when it was available for sale. Yet here we are.
I don’t get it at all. What revenue is Meta going to drive out of AI?
Buying another company for AI, is just repeating buying another company for Siri.
I bet Meta doesn’t stymie developers at every turn with impossible privacy requirements.
Also, I strongly believe that we will never get to AGI in our lifetimes, and AI will naturally hit a plateau, just like with self-driving cars, and with XR headsets. So, once we hit that plateau is reached, and the next iterations of this technology are iterative, the bubble will have popped and once again, layoffs will ensure. The only question is....when....
Having worked in this field, I would say that I am not really surprised.
Their AFM Team is great and consists of intelligent researchers. I don´t think their small models are behind in comparison to other models. Sure, cloud-based LLMs make no sense and Apple would have no benefit with those models as their devices have limited capacities.
However, their model seems to be legit and considered the best model in terms of comparable sizes.
They pushed to convince their executives to roll out their AFM models for Siri, but their executives were not convinced.
In stead of that, the executives have been thinking about a possible acquisition of a LLM provider. The AFM Team did not feel appreciated. The only executive who praises the AFM Team is JG.
Their executives need a transparent communication and make the team understand their high bar for Siri and models. But somehow, their communication seems to be intransparent between the executives and the team.
Their AFM Team is great and consists of intelligent researchers. I don´t think their small models are behind in comparison to other models. Sure, cloud-based LLMs make no sense and Apple would have no benefit with those models as their devices have limited capacities.
However, their model seems to be legit and considered the best model in terms of comparable sizes.
They pushed to convince their executives to roll out their AFM models for Siri, but their executives were not convinced.
In stead of that, the executives have been thinking about a possible acquisition of a LLM provider. The AFM Team did not feel appreciated. The only executive who praises the AFM Team is JG.
Their executives need a transparent communication and make the team understand their high bar for Siri and models. But somehow, their communication seems to be intransparent between the executives and the team.
They also know that Meta are full of it and that they are burning money on nothing. Why not get a piece of that pie whilst it lasts?
Siri had a couple employees and was novel and very immature, Anthropic has improved their product dramatically with the main pain point being usage limits, there is already demonstrable value and even preference especially among developers.
A hypothetical acquisition should come with some 5 year lock-in for key employees given the insane cost, if it were to happen.
There is no comparison in this case, and I mentioned keeping them whole for a reason too – they would need to operate separately for an acquisition to work, I think.
What someone else said about hubris is probably right and Apple won’t do this, but there’s another benefit too: the hype cycle means the market wouldn’t tank Apple’s stock if they spent that much, which won’t be the case once the smaller non-frontier model companies start to fail or lose valuation (e.g. perplexity, cursor, etc. which I think will happen eventually).
There is a timing benefit to this, and if they locked in the personnel it would stop poaching as well.
Anthropic may not compete with world model companies depending on their research capability but that’s a problem for 2030, not 2026.
I personally see OpenAI as being the overvalued AI company, particularly since they have lost a ton of key people to Meta as well, arguably in a more severe way. A lot of Anthropic talent is still there because they are true believers, it’s a good cultural fit as a subsidiary.
This site doesn’t report on it but OpenAI has lost the co creator of ChatGPT to Meta, and many more people who were in critical roles from model training to tuning, and not rank and file employees, the ones responsible for the entire rollout.
If Sam Altman can keep employees they can recover once they launch a browser and pivot into ads (ugh) and launch whatever Jony Ive is working on but I wonder.
Name recognition is also valuable but I think it’s weighted too heavily right now. At one point AltaVista and Lycos had it, too. Google made a better product and those other companies are ancient history.
The proof is in using the things and Opus is just a better tool than o3, usage limits notwithstanding. And it’s tuned in a far more tasteful way.
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